Freaky Music News: Babies Know If You’re Listening To Depressing Music

Here’s some freaky weird music science accompanied by a scary baby doll photo:

Babies as young as five months old can tell the difference between upbeat and gloomy music, providing more evidence that the brain’s ability to detect emotion develops early.

So, if you’ve got young kids around the house, you may want to put away the Depeche Mode and Smiths LPs and play some nice happy trance music for a while.

“They can tell emotions apart,” said study author Ross Flom, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah. “They don’t understand that this is happy music and this is sad music, but they know they’re different.”

The researchers recruited 96 babies and played various types of music for them, Flom said. Most 5-month-old babies showed signs that they could discriminate between types of music when a happy selection followed a sad selection, but not the other way around, Flom said.